


I Forget Where We Were

by perpetualskies



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-18
Updated: 2015-04-18
Packaged: 2018-03-24 15:29:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3773824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perpetualskies/pseuds/perpetualskies
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>„We go to sea very young,“ Finnick says as if answering a question. Shortly after, the Peace Keepers order them back towards the vehicle. For a brief, unnerving moment Peeta wishes he could have seen him swim.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Forget Where We Were

**Author's Note:**

  * For [anassa_anemou](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anassa_anemou/gifts).



> AU in the sense that Peeta grew up being friends with Gale and Katniss. Also, I had not realised before, but Peeta and Finnick have quite a bit of an age difference, so I just pictured them being two, three years apart at most, regardless of what this would actually mean for the timeline. 
> 
> Title from eponymous song by Ben Howard.
> 
> I hope you enjoy! ❤

Katniss comes by early, hovers in the shadows by the barn, digging the toe of her boot into the frosty ground. Peeta casts one last cautious glance in the direction of the house, then slips her a single, slightly misshaped roll, warm still, with just a pinch of rosemary.

„I wish I could come with you,“ Peeta says, proceeding to upend a bucket of scraps for the pigs. It's a bad thing to say, probably. Katniss and Gale hunt to survive. Peeta is surviving just fine.

Katniss gives him a small smile. “I’ll shoot you a squirrel,” she promises and ruffles his hair before taking off. 

Inside, in the hearty warmth given off by the stove, in the quiet that reigns before his mother comes down to open the store, Peeta sinks his hands into the flour and smiles.

 

Peeta knows Gale can’t go, knows what he’ll be telling him five minutes from now in the marble halls of the Justice Building. He might not say anything at all, but Peeta will be able to read it in the tight set of his jaw, the unrelenting square of his shoulders anyway. It's better than he expected, Gale's embrace warm and strong and sincere. He realises later it was because Gale was saying goodbye.

 

Peeta has the feeling that his heart has been beating perpetually faster since his arrival in the Capitol.

He lies awake, following the occasional streak of flood light across the ceiling. The walls of his room are soundproof but he imagines he can hear the crowd in the streets anyway, ecstatic in its anticipation, betting and speculating, waging his odds in between sips of champagne or maybe already writing him off with the bite of a salmon puff. An absurd, bubbly laugh escapes his lips as an equally absurd thought crosses his mind: if he wins this, the only thing he’ll be able to think of for the rest of his life is a lonely cabin by a lake far beyond the meadow and Gale’s drawn up shoulders when he comes in to trade game.

Peeta laughs and laughs. He hasn’t even seen her shoot. Not once.

 

A couple of days after the Games are over, on the eve of the big interview, Peeta passes Finnick in one of the corridors of the Training Center, tries to, at least, before Finnick effectively blocks his way. Peeta didn't know any of the other mentors would still be around. Then again, Finnick Odair has never been _just_ a mentor, not from what Peeta has heard, anyway.

“You killed my tributes,” Finnick states matter-of-factly.

“I was _dying_ in a muddy river,“ Peeta replies without missing a beat. „Have you watched the Games at all?”

Finnick doesn’t bother with particulars. His gaze skids down Peeta's body, searching for that fine breaking line where the flesh has had to yield to the synthetic. It unnerves Peeta to be at the receiving end of the scrutiny of this one man, much more than it did to know his face glimmer on thousands of television sets across the country, to have it zoomed in on for the benefits of the ravenous capitol audience. 

„That must have been terribly inconvenient,“ Finnick says, sounding half-bored, but there's something akin to regret in his eyes when he finally tears his gaze away from Peeta's leg, and it stays with Peeta for a long while after they leave the Capitol. 

 

The Victory Tour is a dire and truculent affair, wrenching the reminders of what they had to do to be there deeper and deeper into their memory. Not that it was really necessary; Cato's last plea for mercy resounds as sharp in Peeta's nightmares as ever. Sometimes it's him down in the mouth of the Cornucopia, surrounded by Mutts and begging for that arrow. He wakes up the moment Katniss lets it fly.

District Four's welcoming ceremony is exactly the same as every other district's before it, until Finnick insists on showing them the sea. It's not exactly protocol compliant and sends Effie into the familiar frenzy of trying to fix up their schedule, but they are granted an escort, graciously allotted time before the banquet. The beach is a windswept strip of speckled sand, the ocean idle at first sight, beckoning. If you step close enough to the water, with the watchtowers at your back and the steep incline of rock to either side of the enclave, all you see is the steady coming and going of the waves, the solace of a single catboat edging along the horizon. Peeta breathes in deeply, again and again. 

„We go to sea very young,“ Finnick says as if answering a question. Shortly after, the Peace Keepers order them back towards the vehicle. For a brief, unnerving moment Peeta wishes he could have seen him swim.

 

Memories of the first Reaping come out blotched in some places and garish in others, hyperreal compared to the grounding tint of finality of the days that followed. Having come out of it on the other side, knowing that it won't happen again—poring over the tapes Effie sent them gives Peeta a sense of control, a chance to try and wrap his mind around something that will always be just a little bit out of reach.

Katniss has gone to bed a while ago and Peeta should too, but his hand refuses to put down the remote, skipping forward and going back again, committing every flexing muscle, every sharply twisted joint to memory. Finnick's back is straight, his chin held up high when the Gamemaker proclaims him Victor, his trident smudged red and still poised to attack. 

 

Peeta smiles wryly as soon as he takes in the rippling expanse of water all around him. It's like all the sponsors in the world preemptively pooled their resources to make sure Finnick Odair comes out as the winner. Maybe they did. 

Finnick comes to get him, Katniss letting him, and that is all Peeta needs to know in that moment to trust him, to slip into the water and let Finnick drape one strong arm around him, cutting swiftly and seemingly effortless through the water with the other. 

Peeta catches a glimpse of the golden bangle on their way into the jungle, and things fall a little into place. It's an artful reminder to _stay alive_ , even if that means to trust someone who is sooner or later going to try and prevent just that. There are promises Haymitch is not going to be able to keep, no matter who the real enemy is; still, Peeta appreciates the effort. 

Watching the tension build between Katniss and Finnick, stepping in before those arrows and tridents have a chance to prove themselves against each other, Peeta wonders if they are the ones it will come down to in the end, a mirroring of Katniss and Cato a little over a year ago. It had taken him a while to realise it back then, when he hadn't known just _how_ apt the girl he grew up with really was, but he knows now, and so does the rest of Panem. She would have let him die in that river bank, Peeta knows that, and now, cause of some perfidious twist of fate, she's here to make up for it.

 

Barely a day into the Games, Finnick saves Peeta's life. Knowing no better way to deal with it, Peeta lies awake imagining how exactly it is that Finnick might die. It is crude and makes his fingers dig deep into the roughly woven grass beneath him, helps him keep his edge and remember the inevitable course of everything yet to come. He imagines Finnick's lean body slack and defeated, his own secrets spilling out of him, helpless and withering like fish stranded on dry land.

Peeta feels the back of his throat coat over, sandy and cracked no matter how much you swallow, but he doesn't want to get up and fetch something to drink, not while Finnick is keeping watch, anyway. 

 

Mags is incomprehensible, tears at him like the surf hurling itself against a cliff face, then slowly, reluctantly ebbing away, deflated. He wishes he could make it better for him; he knows he can’t. Wordlessly, he joins Finnick in the water, his hands and feet sinking easily into the pliant ground. The heavy orange of the sunset is long gone. There are 17 rolls sitting in a grass basket and 8 tributes left to kill—that is about all Peeta knows with complete certainty.

After a long while, Finnick’s fingers find his in the sand, and Peeta doesn't pull away. 

 

The wire recoils with a faint zipping sound, pools around the trunk of the tree in an inextricable knot of everything Peeta dared hope wouldn’t happen. For a moment, nobody moves. Somewhere in the distance thunder rolls like a tired drum. A raindrop lands on Peeta’s cheek. Tick tock.

“What did she do to her?” Peeta yells, and knows not whether to step in on Finnick or to back away.

Finnick's face is closed off, hand gripping tightly at his trident while he listens for more telling sounds from their surroundings. Then he turns, making his way down the slope in the direction of the beach. “You stay here and help Beetee,” he calls over his shoulder, then he is swallowed by the dense green of the jungle.

“Help him with _what_?”

None of this makes sense. Least of all Beetee, hooking his arms around Peeta's legs from where he was crouching on the jungle floor, preventing him from taking another step. Peeta could slit his throat right then and there.

“Let me go, Beetee, _let me go_!”

That’s when Enobaria crashes through the underwood. Between her trademark hissing sound and the flash of her pointed teeth, Peeta's voice catches meekly at the back of his throat, not knowing whom to call for first.

***

For the first couple of days, nothing happens. Times passes seamlessly, sleek and impossible to anchor yourself in. The lights stay on. The white walls of the room are immaculate, not a single spot for tired eyes to latch on to. Then the screaming begins, and somehow Peeta knows it's not Jabberjays.

Peeta's fingers fall into the restless habit of twining around each other, emulating, imagining a piece of rope where there is none to keep his mind from going places too dark and perishable. Katniss was better at it, of course, swifter, but Peeta spent his own fair amount of time at the knot-tying station, remembers a few easy snares, remembers Finnick's fingers even more, weaving into rope or grass or gently interlocking with his own.

He wonders if Finn has betrayed them, and then wonders why he thinks in terms like betrayal in the first place. Johanna’s screams have stopped abruptly, leaving a sharp, pulsing silence in their wake—Peeta refuses to dwell on that too much. Tomorrow, they will come for his interview. Tonight—

He remembers the gleam of a trident in the sunlight and the taste of salt on his lips. Deep, deep breaths at the edge of a shifting shoreline. 

He hangs on to that.


End file.
